subscriber revenue only accounts for 15-25% of total revenues
Ah, that's incredible, I didn't know that. I think it's really easy to connect the dots here. Since news is a commodity and global distribution is cheap, journalism becomes a business of extremes, much like books and startups. A tiny percentage of journalists who are really good at writing will be in huge demand, while the overwhelming majority will barely be able to sell anything. If you couple that with downward pressure on advertising prices, local papers cannot be "saved" - there's just not enough revenue for them in the market to sustain them at all. I don't think the total market size is shrinking, just that small newspapers can't effectively compete.
That means a few big brands will emerge and take the lion's share of the revenue. Or perhaps even one brand that will take everything, "the facebook (or paypal) of news". It was supposed to be Digg, but I guess not...
I suspect that the vacuum left behind by dead local newspapers will be filled by local blogs. I haven't researched this but I wonder if the markets that lost their local paper if blogs have made up the loss. Knoxville, TN has to really nice local blogs even though we have both an alternative weekly (Metropulse) and a paper.
If you do research it, I'd appreciate it if you'd write up a guide to finding good local blogs and submit it to HN. I don't know of any in my area, and aside from googling my city name, I can't think of many ways to find them.
Ah, that's incredible, I didn't know that. I think it's really easy to connect the dots here. Since news is a commodity and global distribution is cheap, journalism becomes a business of extremes, much like books and startups. A tiny percentage of journalists who are really good at writing will be in huge demand, while the overwhelming majority will barely be able to sell anything. If you couple that with downward pressure on advertising prices, local papers cannot be "saved" - there's just not enough revenue for them in the market to sustain them at all. I don't think the total market size is shrinking, just that small newspapers can't effectively compete.
That means a few big brands will emerge and take the lion's share of the revenue. Or perhaps even one brand that will take everything, "the facebook (or paypal) of news". It was supposed to be Digg, but I guess not...